For a rather definitive piece of analysis on the fundamental problem with the Republican party (which simultaneously happens to really suck – follow the link for the joke), you need to look no further than “The Other McCain’s” analysis in Hot Air. Here are just a few snippets to wet your appetite. I think he’s DEAD ON.
Like the conservative grassroots of the GOP, I’m disrespected and abused because all the “influential” and “respectable” Republicans are quite naturally embarrassed to be associated with me. Ignorant backwood hillbillies like me, we never get invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner, never get promoted to the front page, because everybody knows that we’d show up barefoot in bib overalls asking to see the “cee-ment pond.” Je suis un Americain Ordinaire…
You see, the grassroots conservative might have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night. He remembers very clearly hearing this same kind of claptrap before, from the same kind of “centrist” wienerheads who always seem to gravitate toward the top of the GOP prestige pyramid. They’re not much good in a fight, these elitists, because they are ambitious cowards…
You perceive, therefore, why the orthodoxy of the elite is sacrosanct, while the fundamental beliefs of the average Republican in Temecula or Tupelo almost never find a defender in the political class or elsewhere in the elite. For what is true of the politician is true also of the journalist, the professor, the beauty who hopes to become an actress or model. To identify yourself with the Ordinary American – plain-spoken rustic types like Joe the Plumber and Sarah the Hockey Mom – is to abandon any prospect of being accepted by the arbiters of respectability.
This is not true of a voluntary organization like a political movement. The grassroots political activist is not motivated by desire for material reward, but by the expectation that the movement will advance his personal ideals. When political leadership becomes tone-deaf, when decisions that contradict the ideals of the movement are made by a consensus of the leadership cadre, without grassroots approval, and then implemented over the objections of the grassroots — and when those decisions lead to repeated electoral defeat for the movement — then disintegration comes swiftly.
As Someone once said… READ THE WHOLE THING